Monday, January 29, 2007

Pregnant Teens Escape, So Does "Maternity Home" Website

Remember the 3 girls who escaped from the Utah maternity home? They're still missing. The website for the home has also disappeared. Google cache still has it, but it's not in the Wayback Machine. Also, it's just the front page that's gone - you can move from the cached page into the back pages of the website (About, Services, Slideshow, Contact), which are still online. Maybe the home just didn't want the attention (although presumably you could still find their address through some state records). Why does this increase my suspicion that something funny was going on there? Maybe that's not fair, but the whole thing is just odd.

Update: According to a piece in the Salt Lake Tribune, the couple who run New Hope may be closing up shop. Despite stating that "We've had a lot of parents call us and thank us for giving their girls back the way they used to be. We haven't had one negative experience with a girl," Spencer Moody says that "After this, we've decided it's the end of it." Perhaps that explains the missing homepage?

Another 1/23/07 news story (found via Musings of the Lame) includes this odd tidbit: "The 16-year-old's mother, Gina Castro of Chicago, is frantic for news of her daughter. 'I'm not getting any information at all from anybody, I'm scared to death for her life. My daughter's in more trouble now than she was before,' Castro said. She said that until Monday the police hadn't called her about the alleged assault. She now believes her daughter is in California but can't get any confirmation. American Fork Police Chief Lance Call said that they were talking to the families through Jana Moody, the caretaker of New Hope, who the girls allegedly bound and assaulted. Police had not talked to the families about their missing daughters."

Did you read that carefully? The girls escaped on Tuesday, January 16. As of 1/22, the police had not talked to the girls' families, and were speaking to the families only through the woman the girls assaulted, the woman in charge of the home from which the girls fled. I'm very concerned about how this had been handled, and what is going to happen to these 3 girls. How is it that nobody in the media has been able to dig up past residents of the home for testimonials about their treatment there? Or at least has not reported on it?

I have been wondering the same thing. I do know that a second one was arrested - she may have been being helped by her grandmother - http://womenshealthnews.wordpress.com/2007/04/07/second-pregnant-teen-from-utah-maternity-home-arrested/